This first newsletter of leap-year February looks at a book co-authored by Carlo Ratti to see if it offers clues on what he’ll do curating the Venice Biennale next year. Also, there’s the usual list of new books, some headlines, and a couple books from the archive. Enjoy!
Book of the Week:
Atlas of the Senseable City by Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti, published by Yale University Press (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop)
When news broke in December that Italian architect, engineer, and educator Carlo Ratti would direct the next Venice Architecture Biennale, taking place in 2025, two things stood out to me. First, Ratti was selected by outgoing Biennale president Roberto Cicutto “in agreement with” his replacement, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a journalist who is one of many right-leaning sympathizers in positions of power under prime minister Giorgia Meloni. Did Buttafuoco’s presence push the Biennale to make a dramatic 180-degree turn from last year’s exhibition, in which Ghanaian-Scottish architect Lesley Lokko, in The Laboratory of the Future, focused on Africa and the twin themes of decolonization and decarbonization, to a native Italian with “a cerebral, tech-bro Ted-talk conception of architecture”? Hard to say for sure, but it smells like it’s more than a coincidence. Second, the official statement from the Biennale contends that Ratti is “one of the top ten most-cited scholars in urban planning” and has “co-authored over 750 publications.” That’s a lot of publications! Even if we acknowledge that Ratti gets help on those pieces—help that goes beyond the contributions of his co-authors—if there are any hints as to what direction he will take the Biennale in 2025, before his theme is released to the public via another press release, they should be found in his books. The Atlas of the Senseable City is singled out in the Biennale statement, so let’s see what this book reveals…
Even though he’s (co)authored hundreds of publications and Atlas of the Senseable City was written with Antoine Picon, the recently published book is as good a gauge as any as to what Ratti might do with the Biennale, given that he is director of the MIT Senseable City Lab (SCL), a post he has held since 2003, the same year he started his eponymous studio. As the title implies, Atlas of the Senseable City collects maps and other visualizations from twenty years of the SCL, presenting the projects in four thematic chapters: Motion, Connection, Circulation, and Experience. Two images (pulled from an extract of the book’s introduction at Medium) are shown here to serve as examples of the tech- and data-driven projects the Lab’s students undertake. HubCab — above, a project from 2014 in the Mobility chapter — tracked individual taxi trips in New York City to develop “shareability networks” and was eventually used in a collaboration between MIT and Uber toward the latter’s ride-sharing service. Trash Track — below, a project from 2009 in the Circulation chapter — followed tagged trash from disposal to destination, be it a landfill or recycling depot. The visualized data was made publicly available and was later expanded to the international level, showing e-waste traveling from the US to other parts of the globe. Both examples relied on trackable sensors placed on physical objects and eventually visualized the collected data as maps.
The book is full of such projects like those above, nearly all of them illustrated with color-coded nodes and paths rendered across black backgrounds—more appropriate to computer screens than printed pages. The digital resemblance is appropriate, given that the projects are predicated on the ubiquity of the data-driven sensors that are the basis for so-called smart cities. In the introductory text, Ratti and Picon acknowledge privacy and other issues that follow from the Internet of Things and contend that “the future of the city remains first and foremost a political question,” but it still comes across in SCL’s work that there is an overt belief that solutions to urban problems are found in the digital. It’s hard to totally disagree, given how much city dwellers rely on apps on their cell phones and software on their computers to navigate cities, interact with the government and community members, and do so many other things. But the quashing of Sidewalk Labs’ high-profile "smart neighborhood" in Toronto in 2020 makes it clear the public is not ready for a wholehearted embedding of digital tracking throughout cities. Returning to the Biennale, will Ratti turn it into an exhibition about digital mapping? That’s highly doubtful, but I could see Ratti developing a theme that hinges in some way on the convergence of the physical and the digital in our daily lives, using the Biennale to explore how architects and the buildings they design bridge those realms.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Down to Earth: Designing for the Endgame by George Brugmans, published by nai010 Publishers (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Some days I think the only folks taking climate change are the Dutch, as evidenced by books like this one, in which IABR director George Brugmans “shares his in-depth research of key climate crisis-fighting tactics such as energy transition and water management” but also “interrogates examples such as the drought in the Dutch Delta, rising sea levels and gas stoves.”
Flores & Prats: Drawing without Erasing and Other Essays edited by Moises Puente, published by Walther König (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Barcelona architects Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, whom I’ve written about on numerous occasions, are known more for their abundant drawings and study models, but this book reveals they are also good writers, addressing drawing, books, teaching, John Hejduk, Ricardo Bofill, and other topics.
platform.MIDDLE: Architecture for Housing the 99% by 5468796 Architecture, published by Arquine (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — The architects at Winnipeg’s 5468796 Architecture are more talented than their name is memorable (the digits are their company registration number). This book — four slim volumes in one slipcase — collects work born from their own manifesto on “missing middle” housing and studios taught at IIT.
Tane Garden House by Tsuyoshi Tane, edited by Rolf Fehlbaum, published by Vitra Design Museum (Buy from Amazon / Bookshop) — Vitra seems to find a way to add distinctive architectural elements to its production campus in Weil am Rhein, Germany, on an annual basis, such that the 2014 guidebook I reviewed on my blog is now severely out of date. The latest addition is the Garden House by Japanese architect Tsuyoshi Tane, functionally serving the garden Piet Oudolf added to the campus in 2020.
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Book News:
Over at World-Architects I presented a visual tour of Brooklyn Bridge Park — the park and the book (released last week), both by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Princeton University Press interviews Robin Schuldenfrei, author of Objects in Exile, which "looks at the ways in which dislocation profoundly shaped the direction of art and design in the twentieth century" and how ideas surrounding modernism "were diverted and reshaped in new contexts."
MIT Press features an excerpt from An Anthology of Blackness, edited by Terresa Moses and Omari Souza, in which Jillian M. Harris examines how the Golden Section and other mathematical principles were used to lay out urban settlements.
Gregory Pardlo, poet and author of Spectral Evidence, takes the Lit Hub Questionnaire and says, "If I had another career left in me, I’d be an architect. As a kid, I liked to draw my dream houses. [...] I still dream of being an architect. My next book might be architecture-themed."
From the Archives:
On this week in 2013 (February that year was “Book Month” on my blog, with 28 reviews in 28 days) I reviewed Le Corbusier Redrawn: The Houses by Chicago-based architect Steven Park, which I assumed to be a series of “redrawn” books — first comes “Houses” then comes… churches? Unités? — but was later proved wrong, as twelve years later the book remains his standalone study of Le Corbusier’s buildings, done in sectional perspectives like the cover. (Perhaps this fact is why the paperback books goes for between $75 and $500 on AbeBooks.) Ultimately, I wrote, “Park's book is extremely valuable for collecting 26 of the architect's houses in one place, with orthographic drawings all to the same scale. The sectional perspectives are extremely well done, but they would be incomplete without these 2-D drawings, especially the floor plans” that, thankfully, are provided as well.
The introduction to Atlas of the Senseable City, this weeks’ “Book of the Week,” briefly mentions William J. Mitchell’s influential City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn but in a way that shows techno-predictions from the pre-Google days of the internet were off the mark: “Digital culture tended to claim that it would lead to the disintegration of physical space,” Ratti and Picon write, with Mitchell “predicting the inexorable decline of physical mobility in urban settings” in his 1995 book. Mitchell may have been hyperbolic in assertions like this, but much of the book was prescient given how much of an expert he was on the intersection of the digital and physical realms. To wit, he warned us that digital data collection techniques were so powerful “they provide the means to create the ultimate Foucaultian dystopia” — a good way of describing our pantopticon-esque present.
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